Market Opportunity

Virtual humans appear frequently in
various fields such as movies, virtual reality and video games. To create
compelling virtual avatars, the digitization of human hair must gather all the
details found in an individual’s hair. Human hair presents highly convoluted
structures and spans an extraordinarily wide range of hairstyles. Most of
hairstyles in 3D repositories are manually created by various artists and
gamers. Hair modeling techniques usually rely on expensive capture devices and
significant manual labor. Often multiple views are needed to capture the hair
strands. Even with all of this, these hairstyles can lack details needed to
make them lifelike.

USC Solution

USC researchers have created USC-HairSalon, a large 3D hairstyle database.
Each hairstyle contains 10,000 hair strands and look evenly distributed. With
this technology, new detailed hairstyles can be produced with minimal effort.
Virtual avatars created with this are much more realistic than others available
on the market.